Mamet's "The Anarchist' and its audience

When actors and playwrights suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it's usually some witty critic who does the slinging. The actress Diana Rigg assembled some of the meanest and nastiest in her 1983 book, No Turn Unstoned. Who can forget Walter Kerr's dismissal of I Am a Camera— "Me no Leica"? Or Dorothy Parker on The Lake in 1934: "Watch Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B"?

But as a young lad living within a stone's throw of London's Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s, I became aware of the literal stones that could be thrown at theatrical productions. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger opened there to mixed reviews, and he was jeered when he appeared onstage after the disastrous opening night of his The World of Paul Slickey.

Booing and heckling enjoy a long theatrical tradition. Audiences threw tomatoes and other vegetables at the cast of Shakespeare plays that displeased them. During a particularly turgid production of The Diary of Anne Frank, one audience member greeted the arrival of the German soldiers by shouting, "She's in the attic!"

Mamet's time-waster

I thought about this after a recent visit to New York to see The Anarchist, David Mamet's 70-minute play about a former member of a Weather Underground-type radical movement seeking parole after 35 years in prison. Having sat through this stilted production, I turned to the readers' reviews in the New York Times to see if my reaction had been unduly harsh (click here).

All but two of the 27 critiques I read were negative, including one from a respondent who said he'd been going to Broadway shows since the mid-'70s and had seen some real stinkers, "but this one takes the cake." Another called it the worst play ever, and an insult to the audience, while others called it a waste of money and time, and logorrhea personified.

Europeans would boo

Heaven knows, the two actresses— Patty LuPone and Debra Winger— tried at least to do their best with the convoluted material. If anyone could do it, they could: Their reputations preceded them.

What got me thinking, though, was how kind American audiences are. The performances were applauded by people who'd just paid anywhere from $35 to $134.50 for this dubious experience.

A European audience— those who remained in their seats to the end— would have booed lustily. And then demanded their money back.

Shortly after the performance I saw, the producers announced that The Anarchist will close on December 16. If you insist on seeing one of the final performances, I urge you to express your feelings at the final curtain. No need to shout anything worthy of Dorothy Parker or S.J. Perelman; a simple tomato or rutabaga will suffice.♦

To read a response, click here.